In/habitable

L’inhabitable—the uninhabitable—was the bass note sounding through all of the work of Georges Perec, less a category than what categories failed to insure against: the depersonalizing, devitalizing, dark matter of modern histories and geographies, as scandalous as it was ubiquitous. At the end of Espèces d’espaces (1974), Perec would parse “the uninhabitable” into a litany of alienating spaces produced by the very processes of (techno-scientific-military-) industrial advancement and urban growth:

L’inhabitable: la mer dépotoir, les côtes hérissées de fils de fer barbelés, la terre pelée, la terre charnier, les monceaux de carcasses, les fleuves bourbiers, les villes nauséabondes […]

L’inhabitable: l’étriqué, l’irrespirable, le petit, le mesquin, le rétréci, le calculé au plus juste

L’inhabitable: le parqué, l’interdit, l’encagé, le verrouillé, les murs hérissés de tessons de bouteilles, les judas, les blindages

L’inhabitable: les bidonvilles, les villes bidons

L’hostile, le gris, l’anonyme, le laid, les couloirs du métro, les bains-douches, les hangars, les parkings, les centres de tri, les guichets, les chambres d’hôtel

Les fabriques, les casernes, les prisons, les asiles, les hospices, les lycées, les cours d’assise, les cours d’école […]

(Espèces d’espaces 176–177)

The uninhabitable: seas used as a dump, coastlines bristling with barbed wire, earth bare of vegetation, mass graves, piles of carcasses, boggy rivers, towns that smell bad […]

The uninhabitable: the skimped, the airless, the small, the mean, the shrunken, the very precisely calculated

The uninhabitable: the confined, the out-of-bounds, the encaged, the bolted, walls jagged with broken glass, judas windows, reinforced doors

The uninhabitable: shanty towns, dumptowns

The hostile, the grey, the anonymous, the ugly, the corridors of the Métro, public baths, hangars, car parks, marshalling yards, ticket windows, hotel bedrooms

Factories, barracks, prisons, asylums, old people’s homes, lycées, law courts, school playgrounds […]

(Species of Spaces and Other Pieces 89–90; translation modified)

Such lists in Perec’s writing were inspired, as we know, by Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book. But while Shonagon certainly collected “Annoying Things” and “Very Tiresome Things” alongside “Elegant Things” and “Things that Should be Short,” Perec’s list of the uninhabitable, even while it respected rigorously and eloquently the list as form, threatened to ruin it “philosophically” from the inside as principle. For what kind of aggregation or “commonplace” is this, of topoi so aversive to habitation? Each of the sites, motifs or predicaments listed by Perec is a place where the human lives on only by hardening or withering, self-dividing or turning away. In a sense, each is a place where, rather than saying here is another thing that is known by me and makes my/the world, a self posits the hypothesis of its own constriction and dysphoria, the reduction of its knowledge to endurance. These are scenes no “I” cares to recall or gather but only forbears or flees. They may be noticeably disparate in their scale, gravity, objectivity (some, we could say, are less properly dystopian than others), nonetheless they form, collected under the dark sign of the uninhabitable, an inventory of sites of stress, confinement and hardship. Here is a portrait of the world through all the zones and modes through which it sorts, disciplines, constrains, or banishes.

What does it mean to unite all these under the banner of “the uninhabitable”? What kind of thought does it make possible?

Today we would readily call “biopolitical” the rationale underpinning many of the spaces and experiences that Perec inventories. For these are sites of the management of species-life, sites that implement or express a modern logic of rationalization known to produce, as the condition and obverse of all in the world that is beautiful and comfortable (i.e., giving one a sense of security, identity, freedom, opportunity, growth, meaning), another shadowy realm: of control, calculation, extraction, classification, concentration, routinization, disposal, neglect. Perec was four when his father was killed in the war, three years later his mother died at Auschwitz: his childhood was defined by orphanhood and a real instability of place. His writing would be shot through with a dread directed toward certain kinds of places—and a network of other places that came to be associated with these. Perec was psychoanalytically self-aware; he was also well-read in sociological and historical writings that were beginning to process the effects of technocratic power and consumer capitalism on human space and lives. It is no surprise that his litany of the “uninhabitable” suggests a continuum between places of discipline and death, places of imposed intimacy or anonymity, places of neglect and ugliness. This list may provoke some unease today because of its radical heterogeneity, its less than clear “politics”; but there is a lucidity there that moves, woven as it is of memories and frights both personal and world-historical, those of a century mixed with those of a body and a child.

Learning in recent years to think of histories and structures of violence or dispossession through notions such as the biopolitical, racial capitalism, extraction or slow violence, I have found myself sometimes thinking back to Perec’s “uninhabitable.” It may appear, by today’s light, a preanalytical term, an early gathering or grasping, unrigorous because registering a collection of effects rather than a coherence of structures or causes. If its inscriptional force seems nonetheless powerful, it is because at its emergence, in lieu of a theorization there was a list. Faced with this list, I am pushed to conceptualize (or let’s say to write) in order to identify homologies and underlying patterns, but I am also moved to accept (let’s call this to read): here, a self felt or considered something—a place, a moment, an experience, in some way, for whatever reason—to be uninhabitable. Perec’s list is a register of places and ways in which something about the world is witnessed—by a self that feels and speaks for itself and for others—as not “for us,” as indifferent to our well-being or survival. In each point of such a list, “uninhabitable” resists its own theorization, collects small contradictions, picks up parasitical, transversal features, yet accrues the force of a repeating figure. Its inexhaustible force is in the junction of the elementary verb “inhabit” (French habiter) and the negative prefix “un” (French in). In it is thinkable and namable a fundamental un-grounding. For surely there can be no being without inhabiting; we must all, humans, animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, archaea, live somewhere. “Uninhabitable” when applied to a place, even trivially, implies, beyond a crisis of housing, a crisis of being, the drama of a being un-hosted or ill-hosted. An uninhabitable place is the place of the dislodging or decline of the one or ones that cannot or can no longer inhabit it, a place actively defined by that repelling or expelling—setting in motion a migration in space or (what is often worse) a degradation over time.

The phrase that best expresses the uninhabitable as this vexed relation—not a simple non-relation but a tense nexus—between world and being is perhaps Marielle Macé’s arresting line in Nos cabanes [Our Cabins], threaded through the birds of Francis Ponge, Jean-Christophe Bailly, Fabienne Raphoz: “Birds un-sing our ruined world” (“Les oiseaux non-chantent notre monde abîmé”) (90). What would it mean to invest uninhabiting, as the earth grows uninhabitable, with the poetic (expressive) and philosophical (witnessing) force of an un-singing? In the face of extinctions, precarity, the degradation of ecosystems, Macé calls for an enlarging of perception, a deepening of practices of the imagination, in order to defend zones and reopen inhabitable “places”—of dwelling and of thought—within the ruined world, to insist on what, at the heart of disaster, may not be disaster. The call to inhabit or reinhabit the world/earth otherwise—involving more capacious modes of thinking, knowing, counting, listening, caring, describing, or mattering—has been reverberating explicitly and implicitly through much work in the environmental humanities in recent years. It has formed the patient argument of decades of writings by Isabelle Stengers (In Catastrophic Times). It accounts for the reinvigorated alliance of argument and beauty in such thinkers as Tim Ingold, Robin Wall Kimmerer, or Vinciane Despret. Most recently, Malcom Ferdinand has argued powerfully that the call to inhabit the world otherwise is inseparable, both conceptually and concretely, from the call to undo historically imposed modes of appropriative and “altercidal” habitation (Decolonial Ecology). Others observe, in sadness or anger, the extreme deradicalization or cognitive dissonance of our times, making it seemingly impossible to discontinue the one activity guaranteed to make the earth effectively (geophysically, irreversibly) uninhabitable: our catastrophic, somnambulic burning of fossil fuels (Amitav Ghosh, David Wallace-Wells, Andreas Malm). Still others (Sylvia Wynter, Alexander Weheliye, Kathryn Yusoff, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson) point out that the “our”—this suggestion of a shared world, of a historically homogeneous or equally responsible “Man” or “Anthropos”—is precisely the problem.

The inscriptional force and candor of Perec’s term/inventory, its suspended—one might even say compromised—status between literature and “theory,” living/witnessing/imagining and knowing, seems apposite as one navigates the riddled, fault-lined histories and geographies of (un) inhabitability characterizing today’s world. While it is undeniable that Empire, or industrial modernity, or racial capitalism, or “fossil capital” account for many of the forms of dispossession or degradation structuring our world, to think sincerely across that divide of living and knowing—or list and “concept”—is to realize, it seems to me, that no single frame or meta-narrative yields all the needed insights. After all, what historicalmaterialist or ideological explanation would account for everything in a particular story, place, life or mind? Perec himself dreaded such a definitive account: “Behind every utopia there is always some great taxonomic design: a place for each thing and each thing in its place,” he wrote. “All utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, for difference, for the ‘miscellaneous’” (191).

The fact that the word “inhabitable” cancels itself or inverts its sign as one moves between French and English—”l’inhabitable” translating in English as “the uninhabitable”—adds to what I am calling here the term’s irreducible “inscriptional force.” The in/habitable¹ is a restless, unfinished, endlessly “interpellating” notion, it seems to me, both because of the grave question it raises about where and why and by what agencies inhabiting turns into—or produces—an uninhabiting, and because it keeps in potential play the fact that there is no definitive notion of what inhabiting is.

For this special issue, in/habitable offered itself as a fitting totem word for thinking a central dialectic of modernity. As we proceed further into a twenty-first century defined by the unprecedented crises affecting climate, environments, homes, livelihoods, the very claims and practices of inhabitation are increasingly under strain. Haunting questions may be seen to attend not only the semantic, pragmatic or “modal” field of inhabitation—how to inhabit—but also its “subject field”—who or what inhabits a place, who or what becomes displaced or placeless, who or what survives or is “worth saving,” who or what is remembered or imagined, who or what vanishes in the uninhabitable. Could Perec’s notion be potentially generative for thinking today? By framing the question in supple, open, dramatic terms, the intention for this issue was to inspire a variety of critical and imaginative points of entry into the in/habitable. While the essays collected here represent a diverse range of engagements within humanistic inquiry (including ecocritical perspectives, Anthropocene studies, the energy humanities, planetary studies, genocide studies, literature, philosophy, cinema), each in its way takes on the commitment to think contemporary life and cultural forms in their relation to the material, ecological, geophysical, infrastructural and life-sustaining dimensions of the earth. In doing so, I would suggest, each also answers the call to think “across” the divide between story/inventory and “theory,” agreeing to venture beyond what a single heuristic frame (“each thing in its place”) might yield. Asking what thinking was and what classifying was, Perec ventured that the point of such a question was perhaps to better “refer thinking back to the unthought [l’impensé] on which it rests, and the classified to the unclassifiable (the unnameable, the unsayable) which it is so eager to disguise” (189). Similarly, one might ask whether inhabiting, if it is to be understood, should not be referred back to the uninhabitable as that which it transforms, transcends, negates, but which it also produces, through ruse, violence, irony or tragedy, as its moving shadow.